


Confessional

by Potboy



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Cannibalism, Disturbing Themes, First Order savagery, Gen, Hux is Not Nice, Hux is not a cold man, Infanticide, but he is a true believer, hux's speeches have a tendency to go like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 15:09:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6912232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potboy/pseuds/Potboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of his execution, Hux gets to explain himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confessional

**Author's Note:**

> I should probably say that I wrote this in order to allow Hux to tell his story, and I'm not at all attached to the idea of his execution actually happening. So it's highly likely that after the end of the story the FO attacks and in the confusion Hux gets away to fight on another day.

Not so neat in his prison uniform, but sharper – bare bones and eyes like plasma – he looks straight into the camera for his final speech.

“They have given me this opportunity to explain myself. Not for my sake, but for the sake of those injured by my actions, so that in understanding my motivations they might begin to 'heal'.”

His hands are shackled to the table, but he carries himself as though the stillness is voluntary, unhurried, martialing his pauses like the orator he is.

A head tilt, and a softened voice and he's being personal, in a way none of the watchers have ever seen from him before. There's a feeling of anticipation, as if this rehearsed confessional might reveal something real after all.

“When I was four, the Empire fell, and the New Republic came for my family. I don't remember the home world from which I was driven as a child. My first memories are of the Star Destroyer _Merciless_ onto which a large part of the population of Arkansis was crowded.”

A smile of compressed contempt. “This was not an organized retreat. We were piled onto ships without possessions or supplies. Our officers were used to thinking we had a galaxy wide network of commissaries at which we could take on fuel and food. It did not occur to them that these would be barred to us or even destroyed.”

Something happens in his face – his expressions are hard to parse, minimal things. Perhaps the ends of his mouth have lowered. At any rate, the faintly wry tone has darkened as though a candle flame has guttered.

“Since the ship required its crew, such rations as there were on board were given to them, eked out scientifically to last as long as possible. We, mere passengers, began to starve at once, though for a long time we held out hope of relief. Not all the commissaries could be closed, we said. Surely we'll reach the next one and feast. Surely our sympathizers will send a shuttle. Surely in the neutral territories we'll find somewhere we can trade.”

Darker still, and now there's a hint of something seething in the depths, jarringly at odds with his waif-like delicacy, or the softness of his ungelled hair.

“But our sympathizers were cowards, and the creatures in the neutral territories were already having to sell their offspring to find enough food for themselves. They had nothing to spare for us.

“When the first deaths began on board, my father contacted the New Republic and begged for aid. He said 'we are a school.' Because we contained almost all of the pupils of the Arkansis Academy. 'I have a ship full of children,' he said, 'and they're dying.'”

This is a smile only in the technical sense – a mirthless baring of the teeth. “They told him we could turn back at any time, as long as we renounced all our beliefs, and gave up half our officers to be imprisoned, and our children to be put into orphanages and 'de-programmed.' And so we went on, into the Unknown Regions, combing through the unmapped vastness of space for somewhere that would support life.”

His hands are in fists on the table and a small pool of blood is gathering beneath the left, brightly festive in the grey metallic cell.

“The first to die were the nursing mothers, my own among them. They had only that day instituted a sweep of the corridors, morning and evening, to clear the corpses, but she died after the morning sweep had passed, so I sat by her all day as she grew cold. My sister was by that time nine weeks old, and by the afternoon had begun to cry inconsolably as she too learned what it was to starve.”

“I was four. I didn't know what to do but to beat my head against the wall and distract myself. There was nothing to give her, and I thought at that point it was certain we would all die. If only she would shut up and let it happen in peace.”

A flash of that laser-hot gaze again, as though there is some joy in making his invisible audience squirm.

“It was at that point they began to feed us soup.”

Actual teeth in the smile, but it's hard to tell if the expression is malice or pain. Something of both, perhaps, with amusement on top of it, hot and dry eyed. “I was half way through the bowl before I thought to ask what it could be. There had been no stops for a week. My father told me not to be so stupid. Had I not seen them drag away four bodies from our corridor, a couple of hundred kilos of meat, only that afternoon?

“Of course I puked.” It can't be joy – the brightness in his tone, a winding up into fervent passion, familiar from his speeches. “And he hit me. How _dare_ I? he said. How dare I reject my mother's last gift? How dare I spurn the chance to triumph when so much had already been sacrificed for me? How dare I _waste_ my anger and my revulsion on _failure_ when she would have wanted it to become my weapon? How dare I be so ungrateful.”

He laughs. “We were all a little insane by then.”

There's a softness to the curve of his bow lips as if this is a treasured memory, but now the watchers have a name for the shine in his eyes, for the zealotry. An insanity defence is not perfect, but it's something. It's more than they've ever had from him before.

“It was two weeks after that that we found our first habitable planet. My sister and the other infants still died, though. They were too young to be weaned, so they were shot to spare them suffering”

There is an actual tremble to his voice when he says this, but it firms up rapidly and he looks betrayed by it, like someone who has just remembered that once, in a distant past, he knew how to cry.

“We never asked who we were eating. We shared our dead. We shared the guilt and the obligation, made one family, one flesh, by this ordeal. Later, when we were established enough to design our own uniforms, we put the names of our dead heroes around our wrists, so that we would not forget where we came from. But we carried the rest of them in our bodies. We were their legacy, their survival and their revenge.”

This is definitely a snarl. And when everything in him tightens up like this you can see the starvation like a blade under his cheekbones, the reckless hunger in the savagery of his gaze. This is not an Imperial gentleman, sleek and sure of his place. This is a feral thing, barely clawed back from the void.

“The New Republic gave us the choice to crawl to them in the hope of forgiveness or to limp into exile and lose ourselves there. But instead we lived, we prospered, we returned and we destroyed them.”

He's going from this room to his execution and he has a fire in his eyes like the Starkiller. “My mother didn't die, my sister didn't die, my father didn't lose _everything_ so that I could provide you with _healing_. I am not ashamed of what I did, and I am not afraid to join my dead. They've been waiting for me a long time, and I already know that they are _proud_.”


End file.
